


Mirror

by rhien



Category: Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow series - Gemma T. Leslie
Genre: AO3 1 Million, Fangirl-era canon, Gen, I APOLOGIZE, Snippets, Warning: Unfinished, teaser
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 14:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1188615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhien/pseuds/rhien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Agatha is chosen by a mysterious mirror for her magician's instrument, no one knows quite what it will mean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize in advance - this is only a teaser for now. But I wanted to help celebrate AO3 reaching a million. Yay!

“All Wellbeloves are beautiful, Agatha dear,” my mother told me once when I was little. I had asked her because the first thing every new person I met said to me, every single one, was always: “What a pretty little girl you are!”

At five, I finally realized it, and I went to my mother’s bedroom and asked her about it.

“Do we all have the same hair?” I asked, watching as my mother brushed hers. It was long, past her waist; white-gold, gently wavy, and it crackled in the dry winter air. Usually her maid brushed it for her.

My hair is just the same as hers.

“Most of us do.”

“Why?”         

“Because of the faery christening gift, long ago. It still hasn’t worn off.” She sent me out to play with my dollhouse, then – the one I had gotten that Yuletide, with tiny cookpots and model food, miniature silver forks and knives, and a family of dolls with silky clothing – and I never thought to question her words.

Now I wonder.

But then I just went back to the nursery and lined up all the furniture for the dollhouse and thought about faeries, thought about them drinking tea from the little cups on the table. And I thought about how real faeries aren’t very nice, aren’t very safe. They might steal you from your parents when you were a baby. They might give you gifts but, in the stories, the gifts were usually something like three wishes that would twist around and trap you.

Why would faeries give you beauty and white-gold hair for a christening gift? I wondered.

And if they did, what else would it do to you?

* * *

 

I don’t know how other families do it, the ceremony of choosing. I was ten years old, I had already been recruited for the Watford School of Magicks the next year.

It was the night of the first new moon after my tenth birthday. We were on the wide lawn behind the house. My parents, my older brother and sister, my aunt and her husband, my grandfather – they stood at the points of the compass in a wide-spread circle around me, holding the candles. My mother and sister had painted the blue runes onto my forehead and the backs of my hands. My hair was in a long braid down my back, almost as white as the straight, sleeveless shift I wore. I shivered a little in the cold, in my bare feet. My body was still straight and thin then, too.

All the family instruments were laid out in a circle around me, lying on low stools and stones in the grass, gleaming in the candlelight and the stars overhead. I began by looking at each one for a count of three.

Most of them I had never seen before. The Wellbeloves are lucky, Grandfather had told me— _I_ was lucky, to have so many choices. Some families have only a few available magicians’ instruments, and so their children have to make do, and sometimes the matches are not as immediate, not as fitting, as they might be. They have to take time to grow into each other.

I saw a necklace with pearls like the moon, and I remember hoping that that one might choose me. There was a wand, a pair of silver shoes, a gold locket, a ruby ring, a kind of flute. There were more than a dozen objects, and I don’t remember them all now.

I closed my eyes and chanted the words, perfectly. Mother had drilled me on them for weeks. I turned in a circle, five turns, and then finally stopped, and waited, getting my balance back, keeping my eyes closed, listening for the call.

I heard it.

At first it was like a breeze against my cheek, cold and soft. Then it was like a pull, like a magnet, or the way your head nods down to your pillow when you’re too tired to stay awake any longer. Like gravity.

I knew which way to turn, and I did. I couldn’t help it. Eyes still closed, I took a step forward, and then I opened my eyes and looked down.

It was a mirror.

A hand mirror, the kind with a stem to hold that twists into a frame around the glass. The frame was silver, and badly tarnished, the ornate design blackened; the glass itself was dirty, but unspotted and unscratched.

I had never heard of a mirror in the family. But I felt it whispering to me.

I bent over and picked it up. The glass glowed white, and I could see my face in it.

I heard a gasp behind me.

But I didn’t look to see where it had come from—Mother? My sister Christiana?—because my ears were full then, full to the brim with whispers, susurrations like wind in leaves. I couldn’t make out the words, but it felt like I should be able to. My fingers buzzed—on the mirror’s handle, cupping the back, feeling the raised patterns and ridges of silver. The glass was still glowing, and I looked into it, into my own green eyes, lit with the cold, white light, looking strange and alien….

Large hands grasped my shoulders, and I looked up, feeling dizzy. The whispering receded in my ears, down to a soft hissing, almost unnoticeable.

“Agatha?” It was my father, holding me up, and my mother was next to him, and my aunt—everyone had gathered around, looking at me, and they looked… alarmed? I blinked at them.

“The mirror?” whispered Aunt Belinda, and there was definitely fear in her face.

“What?” I asked, glancing down at it again. The white glow had faded; now I could see only stars and shadows in the surface of the glass.

“No one has used the mirror for many years,” Grandfather said softly. “Many. Not since—”

“It chose her,” Mother interrupted, tonelessly. I looked at her, but her face was still. She watched me, but I couldn’t read her eyes.

The whisper in my ears flared again, just for a moment. _They’ll take me from you,_ it said, soft, sibilant: a cool gleam of sound in my mind.

I said nothing, but my hands closed around the edges of the mirror, and I hugged it to my chest.

Father squeezed my shoulders, then let his hands drop. “Congratulations, darling,” he said quietly.

Everyone nodded, everyone but Aunt Belinda. She started to speak. “Are you sure—”

“It chose her,” Mother said again, firmly. She turned and led the way into the house. I followed, stumbling slightly on a depression in the ground, clutching the mirror—my mirror—hard enough that my fingers hurt. I wondered why exactly Aunt Belinda seemed so afraid. I wondered if I had imagined it speaking to me. And I wondered where I could find some silver polish.

* * *

 

I snuck the silver polish out of the sideboard outside the kitchen. I heard Mother and Christiana talking through the door as I searched the drawers for a rag.

“A mirror, Mother?” Christiana is almost ten years older than me. Her object was a gold pendant on a chain around her neck. “Is it really _that_ mirror? The one that the wicked queen—”

She broke off—Mother must have made some gesture. There was a pause, and I wondered for a moment if she knew I was listening. But then she spoke. “I won’t have any of that nonsense, Christiana. No poor young thing should be worried about whether her instrument is cursed or whatever it is Belinda wants to go on about. So hush.”

“But—” Christiana’s voice was softer now, and I had to step a little closer to the door to hear. “What about the screaming? Grandfather said it used to _scream_ when they took it out of the wrappings. That his grandmother heard it when she was a girl.”

Mother made an impatient sound. “It didn’t scream when we brought it out tonight, did it? Screaming mirrors, wicked queens. Nonsense.”

I waited, but heard only the sound of scrubbing and a few muttered cleaning spells. We used to have servants for the cleaning, but by that time Father had had to let them all go, even Cook. As I crept away, I heard Mother’s voice again, low, briefly. “Anyway, no one knows. It was all too long ago.”

There was silence again, and I hurried back to my room before they could catch me in the corridor.


End file.
